Conditioned Incompetence

“The New Leader Holds Court”, by Midjourney AI; my own prompt

Aurélien has been writing lately about how much of the malaise of our crumbling modern systems can be attributed to the incompetence (defined as inability to do the job) of those administering them and working in them. The horrific and growing failures of our education system, for example, surely cannot be attributed to deliberate, evil, insane, malicious teachers out to miseducate and fail their students.

Mostly, this malaise is due to the sheer unworkability of systems that are so huge, bloated and sclerotic that even when everyone knows what needs to be done, it still cannot be done — examples being the US failure to adopt the metric system, or to dispense with the nonsense of daylight saving time. And in part, they’re due to the incompetence of the people working in those systems, mostly the people ‘at the top’.

That incompetence has several dimensions. Firstly, in large organizations, most executives and administrators have never done the job of their subordinates (they were parachuted in from MBA or other ‘professional’ schools, or moved laterally within the organization). The ludicrous assumption seems to be that if you did reasonably well in ‘management’ courses in university, or in some simple on-the-job management task, you’ll be good at managing anything you’re assigned to do.

Secondly, modern post-secondary educational organizations do not attract people with excellent, practical skills and experiences. They reward academic ‘achievements’ (as assessed by other academics), such as publishing articles about their theories in journals, not skill at teaching, facilitating, or mentoring. How can they possibly be expected to teach anyone how to do anything, let alone run a department or an entire organization?

So you have a situation where the people running the show, making the key decisions and mandating that they be followed, are inevitably making incompetent decisions, with inevitably poor, and even (consider our ‘management’ of CoVid-19 for example) catastrophically poor results and outcomes. They simply don’t have the skills and experience to be competent. This is arguably true in all of our systems — political, economic, educational, health etc.

And, making matters worse, these incompetent decision-makers are working within codependent hierarchies that are echo chambers, where being a sycophant is rewarded and where challenging incompetence is “a career-limiting move”. So total bone-heads like Antony Blinken, Rochelle Walensky, Larry Summers, Victoria Nuland, and Jerome Powell (not to mention the two most recent US presidents), for example, continue to hold positions of power year after year and in position after position, despite having long records of dangerous, uninterrupted, staggering incompetence.

And not only do we have massive systems incapable of change or response to change, and incompetence up and down the hierarchy, we have the ‘players’ in each system conditioning each other to believe that what is in fact utter incompetence, is actually outstanding competence — “Look: my beloved boss and my friendly colleagues and my dutiful, obedient staff, and these consultants we hired, all say I’m wonderful, so I must be, right?”

As a result we have not just incompetence, but conditioned incompetence — incompetence that is rewarded and immune to challenge because all the ‘players’ are telling each other that they’re stellar performers and that what they’re doing is the right stuff. And so we have executives earning obscene incomes for mismanaging organizations in all economic sectors, taking credit for others’ work and for brief good fortune, and accountable only to others in their echo chambers.

No surprise then, that at all levels in all sectors of our society all over the world, both private and public, we see, to put it mildly, lousy leadership and fawning followership. Incompetence up and down the line.

And though you may be tired of hearing me say it, none of this is anyone’s fault. No one set out to create dysfunctional, crumbling systems run and operated by incompetents. It’s the inevitable result of our lack of essential skills and experience, our conditioning of each other, and trying to function in systems that are so huge and complex that they are unmanageable, and thus quickly and inexorably begin to collapse.

Look at any of the systems of industrial civilization and you’ll see, everywhere, the signs of inherent unmanageability, a dearth of real skills and experience, and conditioned incompetence. The decline of our education systems into expensive, dysfunctional, and irrelevant baby-sitting services. The decline of our political systems into competing gangs of short-sighted, power-crazed, sociopathic liars. The decline of our economic systems into vehicles for the organized theft from the poor, sick and lower castes by the obscenely wealthy. The decline of our health systems into overburdened, bankrupt, expensive, administratively-bloated shells of incapacity. Same goes for our transportation systems, our public infrastructure, our systems of trade, and all the other systems on which our civilization utterly relies.

All of them led and staffed by incompetent people doing their (awful) best to make inherently unmanageable and unsustainable systems work, when they cannot.

This is what collapse looks like. There is no ‘fixing’ these systems, least of all by replacing the ‘leaders’ with other incompetents. These systems are in the advanced stages of collapse, and in a few decades they will be gone, as extinct as the systems of ancient empires.

What will take their place is unpredictable and perhaps unimaginable: New types of feudal systems, perhaps; systems of barter and scrip; cobbled-together apprenticeship systems for learning essential skills; community-owned medical clinics run by nurses? Or perhaps, as the long collapse deepens, even more anarchic systems: economies without money, politics based on ad hoc citizens’ assemblies, health care systems without pharmaceuticals, and education systems without teachers? We will do what we must. It’s going to be interesting.

Once these systems have fully collapsed (perhaps many times, as naive replacement systems also fail), in a few centuries or millennia, if there’s any of us left, we will likely see the emergence of some viable, sustainable new systems, almost inevitably much more local, small-scale, practical and low-tech. Instead of experts and specialists, we’ll have become, and will rely on, experienced, competent generalists.

If we are able to do that, we’ll have relearned some of the capacities that enabled human societies to thrive for a million years, in the same ways societies of wild creatures have always thrived — tribally, collaboratively, skillfully, and in concert with the rest of life. Fit, again, and at last, for the more-than-human world in which we live.